Anime and where it's made

September 9, 2013

Via Author
I wound up reading Jonathan Tappan's Is RWBY Anime?. Both Author and
Tappan come down firmly on the side of 'no'. For myself, I don't know
what to feel about the whole issue so I'm going to ramble on with some
of my thoughts. I'm going to focus on manga, not because I know more
about manga but because I know more about American and Western comics
than I do about modern American animation.

On the one hand labels like 'American anime' and 'OEL manga' simply feel
cringe-inducing to me (Tappan's description of 'sad' is an apt summary).
On the other hand I feel, contra to Tappan, that Japanese anime
and manga have clear stylistic differences in both writing and art
from their American and Western counterparts. American comics cover a
lot of ground (from big-two superhero comics out through various sorts
of independent and alternate comics, including webcomics) but nowhere
in this range do they really look like manga from what I've seen. I
rather expect you could show people anonymized pages or panels from both
American comics and Japanese manga and have them reliably pick out which
is which (and do similar things with plot summaries).

(Frankly, part of this is that the average manga artist is probably
better than the average American comic artist, not because of intrinsic
talent but because Japan has evolved a ferociously competitive and
sophisticated manga market. My impression is that you must be on the top
of your game to have a chance in Japanese manga; this is not really true
in America, most especially in American superhero comics.)

Given this stylistic difference and an increasing number of people in
the West who've grown up reading manga, some number of them will want
to create works in the style of that manga. If nothing else those are
the stories and art that appeal to these creators (and some of them may
have little or no exposure to American comics; just look at the relative
sales figures for translated manga and traditional comics). Today we
lack a good term for such works. They are not 'manga' in the sense that
they are not from Japan and the Japanese manga system but at the same
time they are going to be stylistically different from 'American comics'.
If these new works are executed well they will be far closer in style to
Japanese manga than anything else.

(One of the problems with 'OEL manga' today is that many of the works
have not been executed well by Japanese standards; they would not pass
muster as real manga and cannot compete with it.)

I see a similar issue happening with RWBY and animation in general. The
creators of RWBY are clearly familiar with anime and are drawing much
of their stylistic inspirations from it. The result today is somewhat
clumsy and awkward and not entirely successful (much as OEL manga has
been, although I think RWBY is better executed) but I wouldn't be
surprised if that gets better as everyone involved gets more experience.
And as with 'manga-style comics', we currently lack a good term for such
animation and I suspect we're only going to see more of it.

(If you want to make 'grown up' animation in the west I don't think you
have very many models to follow and the dominant one is likely to be
anime.)

I don't think Tappan's call for animators to develop a style that's
different from anime and manga is really the right approach. At its core
what it amounts to is telling people not to work in the style that they
like and admire simply because they are not from Japan. It's especially
unlikely to work if you believe that the manga and anime style is
further evolved and more artistically sophisticated and successful than
the western counterparts.

(I do tend to think that anime and manga have better developed styles of
art, composition, directing, and storytelling, not because of any innate
superiority but simply because both fields have a lot more practice
under ruthlessly competitive conditions than their Western equivalents.
This commercial competition doesn't always work out artistically (see
the parade of cookie-cutter anime that gets churned out every year), but
it often nurtures a significant degree of competence.)

Sidebar: the audience reason for 'OEL manga' and 'American anime'

This is obvious but worth mentioning: one pragmatic reason to stick
those labels on your works today is to attract people who like manga
and/or anime but do not like Western comics or Western animation. You
are basically hanging out a genre sign, much like covers on fiction
books.

I suspect that this is a not insignificant issue for
RWBY, although it also gets to draw on a growing machinima movement in the west that is
breaking out of the general confines of traditional animation.